Every reference that I've looked at suggests forcing a crash, and then re-opening word. This seem like an kludgey way of resolving the issue, and was hoping there was a manual way to force open the Recovery Pane, or some kind of plugin I can download to simulate the process.

Since no one seems to actually understand your question, I will take a stab at it.

If I understand your problem correctly, you open Excel and the Document Recovery task pane appears with a list of files for you to view. You click on a file, review it for errors, save and/or close the file depending on whether you found errors, etc, and then go back to the task pane to open the next file.

But wait...it's gone! Slightly confused about why that panel would disappear after clicking on only one file in the list, you search around on the File menu and all the other tabs, frustrated that you can't find the stupid panel again. So you close Excel and restart it, hoping the panel appears again. And it does! You quickly realize, though, that since you have something like 20 files to review, closing and re-opening Excel after each file is beyond annoying.

I had this problem, too. It's unbelievably annoying. Who the hell thought that was a good idea??

tl;dr

Anyway, I found the answer by accident. Next time you have this panel open and you click on a file, when you are finished but before you close the document, look at the bottom left corner of the window. You should see the word "Ready" and then "Recovered". Click on the word "Recovered" to reopen the task pane. Next, write an angry note to Microsoft via the Feedback button. Because this is just asinine.

If you can't find the temporary files then try these steps

• Close any/all document you are in (save or don't save as applicable) and Select "Yes I want to View these Files Again" when the dialogue box prompts.


• Then open up Word again and on the left there should be a prompt to show recovered documents.


• Type some gibberish into the default blank "Document 1" to keep that window from closing when you open up one of the recovered documents.


• Then, once you decide to do with the recovered document, the pane should be still there in the Document 1 window and/or you can switch back to that window to open up the next document.

I cannot find any sort of simple Ctrl+XXcommand or function key to open it say, the same you would open the Navigation Pane, but carefully closing the documents might be a bit more graceful than forcing a crash.

Go to File > Open (or press Ctrl+O). There should be an option on the bottom right saying Recover Unsaved Documents.

This will open the folder with the unsaved documents, not the Recovery Pane, but it should solve your issue.

Often had the same issue and the associated frustration, so I ran Process Monitor (tool from Microsoft SysInternals site) whilst having the Document Recovery Pane open to try and capture where Excel was getting this list of 'files to be recovered' from: I found them here:

"C:Users%USERNAME%AppDataRoamingMicrosoftExcel"

Likewise you should also find files-to-be-recovered from other Office applications if you replace "Excel" with any other Office application name (e.g. "Word"). You should be able to simply open the files you find in those locations with the associated Office Application. You will likely find that MS Office usually stores these backup in the equivalent Binary Office File Format, but this should make no difference, since once you have opened the file you can save is as any valid format for the relevant Office Application (e.g. Excel, Word, Power Point etc.).

Open Word > Click on File

On the right hand side there should be an icon that says "Manage Versions" (Don't Click on the Icon). Right beside that, under the title "Versions" is where I found my file named something like Files Not Saved when Microsoft Word unexpectedly closed without saving at (Time).

I clicked on that an up it popped. I had tried the Unsaved File Folder and a few other places with no luck. I found this by accident but there it was. Thank God (for me at this time) and Good Luck to you all! Hope this helps someone.

I found a pattern (Excel for Office 365 ver. 1808):

It reappears if you close all the documents you opened from the pane.

• For quick closing of current document, use Ctrl+W.

There is no need to exit the Excel, closing recovered documents is sufficient.

You can better observe the behavior by dragging the pane by its heading outside the Excel window (for example to second monitor) and then hiding and re-appearing of the panel becomes obvious, including the annoying fact that is it not kept constantly displayed.

The tricky parts with the pane are:

• there is no way to explicitly display the pane


• it auto-hides on some actions (e.g. on Show Repairs) - so it is not just covered by other content, it gets hidden


• it auto-displays itself when unintuitive condition is fulfilled (you closed all the repaired documents you opened using that pane)